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entirely correspond to the literature’s description of that specific age and phase
of development. Or how could I possibly answer when people in my little French
town ask me what a Swedish person is like? I always need to use a few persons
I know to get the complete stereotyped picture of the Swedish identity. Nobody
I know is a pure Swedish person, in the way the map has been drawn up for
such a person. In fact, I do not think I have ever met a Swedish person, nor a
French one. Within the stereotyped picture of identity we imagine individuals
to differ from each other, but what if the difference is to be found in each person
instead of in between people? And what if that means, when it comes down to
it that we are all similar to each other in the way we perpetually differ from
ourselves?
’We need a conception of society in which what we have in common is
our singularities and not our individualities – where what is common
is ”impersonal” and what is ”impersonal” is common.’ 12
We can then talk of singularities and a-lives, instead of individualities and
identities. We add to the concept of individuality, the concept of singularity,
implying that there are no such things as defined or natural identities. There are
only singular a-lives. It is from this logic that I have named this article A Virtual
Child. This could imply a learning pre-school child that has never been seen or
heard of, and most of all that could never be identically imitated. A child that
is impossible to pin down to a specific individuality, impossible to run through
the construction of mappings of identity. To work with the image of a learning
pre-school child from an idea of a- lives could mean to find oneself in a continual
quest for, not who the child is or could be, but simply what children as a lives,
for the moment produce and can do.
virtual child
To be able to imagine a learning pre-school child that it is never possible to
imitate or re-produce, we are now going to turn to the concept of ‘virtuality’.
According to Deleuze, philosophy works with concepts and science with functions.
They act differently in this way, because of the way they differently relate
to chaos. Deleuze defines chaos, not as disorder but as ‘’an infinite speed of
birth and disappearance’. 13 Chaos is anything but a nothingness. It is rather a
virtual. A virtual that consists of all possible ways of for example being a learning
pre-school child. Whilst science tries to slow down the frantic pace of birth and
disappearance by capturing certain ways and forms of being a learning pre-school
child, to reflect, comment and communicate them through a specific frame of
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